You would think Microsoft could empathize with it’s customers just a little more than they do. Everyone uses Microsoft Office. Much of the universe has upgraded to Office 2003 and everything works just fine. We email documents back and forth with ease. We download Word or Excel documents off the internet and use them on our computers without any trouble.

But very recently, some people are now finding out that Office can’t open Office documents anymore. Are you getting these errors?

Word 2003: When you double-click the file or you double-click the file as an attachment in e-mail –

ERROR MESSAGE: “Windows cannot open this file.”

PowerPoint 2003: When you OPEN a file you get –

ERROR MESSAGE: “PowerPoint can’t open the type of file represented by filename”

PowerPoint 2003: When you double-click the file icon or name or you try to open the file as an attachment in e-mail you get-

ERROR MESSAGE: “Windows cannot open this file.”

Excel 2003: When you Open a file you get –

ERROR MESSAGE: “The file is not in a recognizable format.”

Excel 2003: When you double-click the file or you double-click the file as an attachment in e-mail, you get –

ERROR MESSAGE: “Windows cannot open this file.”

How strange is it that Office can’t open Office documents?!?!?! We just assume the sender or creator of the original document did something wrong and as them to re-send. And again, it doesn’t work. Why not?

VS.

Here’s probably why: While you’re stuck in 2003, they’ve upgraded to Microsoft Office 2007. Perhaps they bought a new PC or laptop. Or they just bought the new Office 2007 package itself from BestBuy or somewhere else. But basically, the default file format that Word 2007, Excel 2007, Powerpoint 2007 uses CANNOT be opened by any Office 2003 products. Microsoft is now using something called Office Open XML file formats. Office 2003 and earlier can’t read these natively. You supposedly can do more with this new file format, but for now, it’s apparently limiting what YOU can do with it, right?

There are 3 options to fix this problem:

1) Get the original writer of the file to re-save it in a backward compatible Office 2003 format — which you’ll have to ask them to do every time, and ask everyone that has Office 2007 to do it each time you encounter someone new sending you documents. What a pain in the neck, and more probably, you’ll be seen as the pain in the neck!

2) Upgrade to Office 2007 yourself and cause trouble for everyone else to whom you send documents. Then jump to last sentence of Option #1 above. Of course, if you’re stuck back in time with Office2002, 2000 or earlier, you proabably should just go the cheap route for now and get Office 2003 and go to #3 below!)